The vpweb from freezy

Port Physics Engine to JavaScript

We have the meshes from vpx-toolbox, now we need to apply rigid body physics on them.

I think it's best to port VP's engine to JS (as opposed to using another engine like ammo.js), because:

VP's physics are very good
We can avoid figuring out how to port parameters from existing tables to a different physics engine

Since the physics engine should run faster than the rendering (preferably at 1000fps), we'll run it as a web worker on its own thread. That means we have two contexts we need to synchronize: The main thread where rendering is taking place, and the worker thread where the calculations are being made.

Main Thread (Rendering)

The main thread contains the rendered version of the three.js scene. It retrieves transformation matrices from the worker and applies them before the each render frame.

It also sends user events to the physics thread (although the physics thread will probably get all its triggers through a third ROM emulator thread)

Worker Thread (Physics)

The physics thread applies world physics to all collidable objects and emits transformation matrices to the main thread so it can render them correctly. These calculations are based on:

The playfield parameters (what's been read from the .vpx file)
The values of additional dynamic parameters
A 3D model of collidable shapes.

Whether the collidable shapes are going to be handled with three.js is not clear yet.

Note that 1000fps doesn't mean running setInterval() at 1ms. We render only at 60fps, so everything in-between doesn't have to be real-time. That means for every rendered frame, we can run 17 physics cycles with dtime spread across 17ms (UE calls this sub-stepping).

Data

The idea is to pass data as transformation matrices to from the physics thread to the main thread, using classic web worker messaging.

However, keeping a shared memory block with updated matrices might would be another way. See:

Install

Hi @freezy nice project but i can't install vpweb because of dev-dependencies. Is this project maintained ?

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Detected dependencies

github-actions

.github/workflows/firebase.yml

npm

package.json

bootstrap 4.4.1

three 0.112.1

vpx-js 1.3.1

autoprefixer 9.7.3

copy-webpack-plugin 5.1.1

critters-webpack-plugin 2.5.0

cross-env 6.0.3

css-loader 3.4.2

ejs-loader 0.3.5

escodegen 1.12.1

estraverse 4.3.0

file-loader 5.0.2

html-webpack-plugin 3.2.0

http-server 0.12.1

mini-css-extract-plugin 0.9.0

node-sass 4.13.0

postcss-loader 3.0.0

raw-loader 4.0.0

rimraf 3.0.0

sass-loader 8.0.1

style-loader 1.1.2

svg-inline-loader 0.8.0

timeago.js 4.0.2

webpack 4.41.5

webpack-bundle-analyzer 3.6.0

webpack-cli 3.3.10

webpack-dev-server 3.10.1

webpack-merge 4.2.2

webpack-pwa-manifest 4.1.1

workbox-webpack-plugin 4.3.1

worker-loader 2.0.0

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Port Scripting Engine to JavaScript

VP's scripting language of choice is VBScript. I think at some point, IE supported VBScript natively, but this was decades ago. So we need to find a way to run the table scripts in the browser without having to manually rewrite it.

Since browsers today all support JavaScript, the most obvious way would be to transcribe all VBScripts to JavaScript. In order to do that, we need to:

Write a grammar
Tokenize and parse the VBSes
Produce JSes
Implement (or stub) the linked libraries

A VBS grammar can be found here in the BNF format. Depending on which parser, the grammar needs to be ported. There are a few parsers in JavaScript:

Once we have an AST of the script, JavaScript code needs to be emitted. astring is a library doing that, but the AST needs to be ESTree compliant.

Finally, many scripts load Windows DLLs and access their API directly via VBS. These need to be stubbed and implemented where functionality is needed (e.g. VPinMAME). Also, the VBScript's standard library probably needs to be at least partially implemented.

bundle latest supported playfield with vpweb

bundle the latest supported playfield with vpweb. so we're sure we test all with the same playfield and avoid confusion.

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